Elixir vitae

“ The ancient spoke: "You overcame joy and rage, grief and fear, hate and desire, it is true; but love you had not driven from your soul. Had you not cried out when tho child was flung against the wall, then my elixir would have taken shape and you would have attained immortality. But in the last moment you failed me. Now it is too late. Now I can begin brewing my elixir of life once more from the beginning, and you will remain a mere mortal man!"
Du Dsi Tschun saw that the oven had burst, and that instead of the philosopher's stone it held only a lump of iron. ”

“ Instead of simply making a human sacrifice, mankind as a whole was destroyed for rebelling against the gods, the act of rebellion being murmuring about the king's old age and loss of virility. The elixir soon became something more than a rejuvenator: it was transformed into the food of the gods, the ambrosia that gave them their immortality, and distinguished them from mere mortals. ”

“ How do you know that this essence which the Dervish possessed was the elixir of life, since, it seems, you have not tried on yourself what effect its precious drops could produce? Poor wretch, who once seemed to me so awfully potent! do you come to the Antipodes in search of a drug that only exists in the fables by which a child is amused?"
"The elixir of life is no fable," cried Margrave, with a kindling of eye, a power of voice, a dilatation of form, that startled me in one just before so feeble. "That elixir was bright in my veins when we last met. ”

“ Then, seeing the consternation of the alchemist, she continued: “For thirty years I have loved you, and I would not doom you to a perpetual prison in the body of an infirm old man; in your turn, do not condemn me. Spare me this death which you term life. Let me suffer the change which is necessary before I can live again truly: let us renew our nature with an [Pg 323] eternal youth. I have no wish for your elixir, which prolongs only the night of the tomb: I aspire to immortality.” ”

“ Your health is weak, your nerves unstrung. That elixir is a powerful vivifying tonic, acting with great rapidity on the entire system, and rushing through the veins with the swiftness of ELECTRICITY. I am accustomed to it; it is my daily medicine. But I was brought to it by slow, and almost imperceptible degrees. A single teaspoonful of that fluid, mademoiselle, administered to anyone not prepared to receive it, would be instant death, though its actual use is to vivify and strengthen human life. ”

“ I have solved at last the secret of life itself. It is contained in that golden vial, an elixir to renew the tissues, to repair the cells, of the wasting body. Taken as I direct, you will no longer grow old, but young. The gray in your hair will vanish, the lines will smooth out of your face, your step will become buoyant, your pulses quick, your heart will sing with youth." The speaker paused a moment, and his gray eyes rested on Carringford and seemed probing his very soul. ”

“ This very idea had disturbed me during my ride over the Alps, and I exclaimed: "Therein lies the dangerous power of the elixir! It kindles in our minds the confidence that we know the truth by means of a charm, whereas we can only possess the desire to seek for it. Our certainty also misleads us to constrain others to think as we think, and to despise them and persecute them when they differ from us. ”

“ But if thou art so enamoured of life as to care only to live on, no matter for what ends, recruiting the nerves and veins with the alchemist’s vivifying elixir, why seek these dangers from the intermediate tribes? Because the very elixir that pours a more glorious life into the frame, so sharpens the senses that those larvae of the air become to thee audible and apparent; so that, unless trained by degrees to endure the phantoms and subdue their malice, a life thus gifted would be the most awful doom man could bring upon himself. ”

“ The Force capable of such a transformation transcendeth the potency of the Elixir itself. The Word of God, alone, can claim the distinction of being endowed with the capacity required for so great and far-reaching a change. ”

“ The Book of God is wide open, and His Word is summoning mankind unto Him. No more than a mere handful, however, hath been found willing to cleave to His Cause, or to become the instruments for its promotion. These few have been endued with the Divine Elixir that can, alone, transmute into purest gold the dross of the world, and have been empowered to administer the infallible remedy for all the ills that afflict the children of men. No man can obtain everlasting life, unless he embraceth the truth of this inestimable, this wondrous, and sublime Revelation. ”

“ I have read of an unlucky sage who discovered the Elixir of Life, and who, after thrice renewing his existence, at last voluntarily resigned himself to death, because he had exhausted all that life had to offer of pleasure or of pain, and knew all its vicissitudes but the very last. ”

“ He must take the Elixir of Life which he has developed and with it fill the lamp of his spiritual consciousness, and holding that above his head, walk into the Great Unknown, where if he has been a good and faithful servant, he will learn of the alchemy of Divinity. Where now test tubes and bottles are his implements, then worlds and globes he will study, and as a silent watcher will learn from that Divine One, who is the Great Alchemist of all the universe, the greatest alchemy of all, the creation of life, the maintenance of form, and the building of worlds. ”

“ It is as though you had touched me with a vivifying wand—as though you had given me to drink of the elixir of life. Well, you have given me to drink of the elixir of love; and that is even more potent and marvelous in its effects. These are not mere phrases, Christine, dashed off in enthusiasm, without being weighed. They are an imperfect expression of very real and practical facts. ”

“ The irreplaceable liquid wastes its force on the desert sands, where a magic richness of herbage instantly springs up in contrast to the barrenness around it. Flowers bloom, myriads of insects hover round them, and all is life, but the man who sought the elixir with such pains lies dead. The author suggests a symbolic meaning for his story, hinting that the scientist’s laboratory holds many elixirs of life, that all growth and life are magical, that all being is miraculous. ”

“ And at the thought of this discovery of the alchemy of the twentieth century, an immense hope opened up before him; he believed he had discovered the universal panacea, the elixir of life, which was to combat human debility, the one real cause of every ill; a veritable scientific Fountain of Youth, which, in giving vigor, health, and will would create an altogether new and superior humanity. ”

“ Likewise these souls have traversed the earth-world in an instant through the Divine Elixir, entered the worlds of sanctity, and in one step reached the Divine Placeless from the limited world of place. An effort is needed that thou mayest attain this Elixir which in an instant causes the west of ignorance to reach the east of Knowledge, makes the gloominess of the dark night attain to the brilliant morning, guides the remote one in the wilderness of doubt to the fountain of nearness and assurance, and directs the mortal temples to the Rizwan of immortality. ”

“ From these he had extracted scarcely enough of the elixir to fill a third of that little glass which I have just drained. He guarded every drop for himself. Who that holds healthful life as the one boon above all price to the living, would waste upon others what prolongs and recruits his own being? Therefore, though he sold me his secret, he would not sell me his treasure."
"Any quack may sell you the information how to make not only an elixir, but a sun and a moon, and then scare you from the experiment by tales of the danger of trying it! ”

“ Takes alembic, as Rhasis obeys, and continues invokingly:
But now, vial of immortality!
By the presaging of the seven planets,
And by the searchless sources of the Nile,
And by the prayers of Christian and of Heathen,
And by the elements earth, air and fire,
That hold within their intermingled veins
The secret of illimitable life—
By fate and time and God—I here conjure you
Bring forth the Elixir which shall make her rise! ”

“ The poet is making a reference to the rose of the alchemist's dream—the strange old fairy-tale of the Rosicrucians. It was believed in the Middle Ages and even later, that an Elixir of Life might be formed by chemistry—that is to say, a magical drink that would make old men young again, or prolong life through hundreds of years. ”

“ He never would have died except from the accident, as he had taken several doses of the Elixir. Just how long it will enable a man to live we do not know, but certainly one hundred and fifty years and perhaps even two hundred years. ”

“ Elixir of Life. Immortality that proves such a curse in the case of the Wandering Jew forms the basis for various other stories. The elixir of life was a favorite theme with the Gothicists, being used by Maturin, Godwin, and Shelley, and has continued to furnish complication for fiction since that time. The theme has been popular on the continent as well as in England, Balzac and Hoffman being the most impressive users of it. ”

“ Have you really measured the world by scrutinies, or through alembics and crucibles? For you must indeed be a great chemist, and the elixir you administered to my son, which recalled him to life almost instantaneously" --
"Oh, do not place any reliance on that, madame; one drop of that elixir sufficed to recall life to a dying child, but three drops would have impelled the blood into his lungs in such a way as to have produced most violent palpitations ”

“ One would imagine that the man to whom the elixir had been so beneficial would set a greater value upon it than others, and would be more careful to preserve it for his children and grandchildren. Not so. ”

“ Heidigger’s Experiment Hawthorne gives us another sad symbolic story of the quest of the elixir of youth. The old physician invites four aged friends to [185] make an experiment, to drink of a cordial which shall restore youth, but which he himself is too wise to share. The strange potion proves its power by restoring to beauty and perfume a rose that has been dead for over fifty years. When the old persons drink they become young and happy and beautiful once more. Age drops from them like a mantle discarded and the world glows again with passion and color and joy. ”

“ The idea mentioned above, that the grosser elements of man's nature might be refined away and immortality attained, seems to have suggested an immortality, not merely in an unseen [164] world, but even in this one, to be secured by an imaginary elixir of life. Certain at any rate it is, that so far back as a century or so before the Christian era, the desire to discover this elixir had become a national craze. ”

“ These late rationalizations are merely glosses of the deep motives which more than fifty centuries ago seem to have prompted early pharmacologists to obtain a more potent elixir than human blood by stealing from the heights of Olympus the divine blood of the life-giving deities themselves. ”

“ Nature reflected in a mirror, would be what his pictures under the influence of our elixir, would have been like, and for a true work of art, in the highest acceptation of the term, something further is needed."
These words of my father removed my last regret for the loss of the elixir, and my sons and grandsons who are now grown men have, with God's help, brought it to pass that the burghers of Leipsic are willing once again to associate with the Ueberhells. ”

“ The old lady also took great pleasure in dressing the boy very finely, and as he would one day be rich, she had no fear for his future, save that on his twenty-fifth birthday he was to receive his father's elixir, concerning which, loyal to her oath, she maintained silence towards everyone. ”

“ The impelling cause that first drove them to the hills was no doubt to find the magical herbs and roots that were necessary ingredients of the elixir of life, and to practise the self-control and purity of thought that were as essential to success as the mysterious draught itself. ”

“ The idea, not infrequently attributed to the alchemists, that the Elixir would endow one with a life of endless duration on the material plane is not in strict accord with alchemistic analogy. From this point of view, the effect of the Elixir is physiological perfection, which, although ensuring long life, is not equivalent to endless life on the material plane. “The Philosophers’ Stone,” says Paracelsus, “purges the whole body of man, and cleanses it from all impurities by the introduction of new and more youthful forces which it joins to the nature of man.” ”

“ Have you lost the power of assimilating food? Are you oppressed with an indescribable lassitude? Can you no longer follow the simplest train of thought? Are you troubled throughout the night with a hacking cough? Are you—in fine, are you but a tissue of all the most painful symptoms of all the most malignant maladies ancient and modern? If so, skip this essay, and try Somebody's Elixir. The cure that I offer is but a cure for overwrought nerves—a substitute for the ordinary 'rest-cure.' Nor is it absurdly cheap. ”

“ Three apparently hopeless quests have engaged the abilities of inventors and scientists from a very early period—the Philosopher's Stone, that should convert everything it touched into pure gold; the Elixir of Life, that once partaken of should invest the recipient with immortality on earth ”

“ If he have secured the elixir, he can spare the wide gardens from which it was distilled. A cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which nature works, and the education of the will is the flowering and result of all this geology and astronomy. ”

“ The exhalation of the elixir acted only on the tongue, and hence its fatal effect, if, however, it had been possible to infiltrate a desire for truth into the whole man, then, ah then! it might have been possible for a man really to know himself, which is the beginning of his salvation. ”